Mihai Alisie - Founder AKASHA-Foundation - Crypto Valley Festival 2020, CEO Tino Ahlers

Transcript

[Music] and

a very very helpful welcome to you mihai it's your stage very welcome thank you that you're here uh thank you very much for the introduction and hello to everyone watching this crypto valley festival yes uh very excited to be here and you know it's almost like a dream looking back like six years ago uh crypto valley was nothing but a bunch of random people from around the internet uh united by this common vision of uh and passion for blockchain technology uh look at us you know a few years later having a festival and you know a

bunch of other really cool ideas that we discovered along the way and uh today uh i would like to look a bit at the bigger picture and uh you know in the in the agenda there we have like ethereum defy decentralized autonomous organizations and uh like the more i thought about it like in the end it's all about communities it's like uh the end goal of this uh blockchain thing is not so much the technology in itself but rather what it can actually bring of value in our lives as humans so it's a tool built for humans to serve humanity not to rule it uh that's what i like to to believe at least and

that being said uh following the introduction of the akasha foundation i would just like to point out that as an initiative we describe ourselves as a non-profit born at the intersection of blockchain and collective intelligence and collective intelligence is one of the topics that i'm very uh passionate and fascinated about because as social creatures we humans do this thing without even knowing or realizing it whenever we find ourselves in a group whenever we find ourselves in a bar whenever we find ourselves at a football game in the stadium we are unawarely

participating into this like mind group and my belief is that these technologies and these tools at our disposals will make this a lot easier and you know supercharged with super power so to say because now with this technology we are able to move at light speed not just information but also value and this is quite uh quite a big one we'll get back to this uh in a bit but before we we get there uh it's this is a post uh on the ethereum blog um that i published in uh 2014 in july uh i think it was the day when we also

founded the ethereum foundation in switzerland and uh you know this is uh one of the first moments when i like you know had the public uh interaction with the community that was forming around the technology i was like whoa this is so so cool it's like these people are just drawn out of nowhere it's like this technology was a beacon attracting these curious minds from all around the world and uh in the the second paragraph here i uh i like this quote a sea of minds brought together by the idea of a turing complete general purpose blockchain is creating as you're reading this line the minecraft of blockchain technology and you know it's like wow

that was not so far off uh looking back so this aged well so to say since 2014 and uh fast forwarding this is also like another post i wrote like a year later uh in march 2015 and this is an excerpt for from that post it's a pretty long one if you're interested in the like the ancient history of ethereum this is a good read but the paragraph here that i'm highlighting was that the stage has been set in less than a month since we first touched down at the turk airport we had the swiss entity up and running a legal strategy starting to take shape and the big up a big big up uh goes to the people from open transactions and bitcoin streets

for their help and the strategic swiss networks they they're shared with us so besides just the you know jurisdiction and the nice view and landscape where switzerland has we were also very lucky to get in touch with the beautiful people that were already uh playing let's say with blockchain and you know ethereum found its home but the before we uh we get there um it's like it's important to understand a bit like the impact and the ramification and after all why were we even here you know here because i'm uh in seoul uh

at the moment so in the crypto valley uh and uh besides the amazing uh and breathtaking landscape what brought us here was that we found ourselves like many technology yeah like many technology driven projects let's say in this space we started with uh it's like yes this ethereum thing can be so revolutionary it's like gonna change everything and then you know it's like oh wait so we have this technology and then there's gonna be like individual a individual b and individual c which are going to be contributing and individually liable and keep in mind that this was happening

around 2014 and let's say the general perception of blockchain technology was not what it is it was a lot more fear-driven rather than a curiosity opportunity driven and many jurisdictions it was like a bad idea a full stop to start or establish the home base for a project like ethereum and uh we realized though in the along the way like hey we need a legal person that will help us to have like you know in a way like a shield because uh it wasn't just us that we were interested in uh being able to sleep uh better at night without feeling you know legal all sorts of legal unforeseen

consequences for building this technology but also you have like employees and other people that are part of this and like developers uh in this case uh which you know were like hey i'm going am i going to get in trouble for contributing to this technology and as you can imagine like everyone wanted to hear no everything is gonna be okay everything is going to be clear but especially in that time and i think to an extent also today whenever you talk with lawyers about this sort of stuff the general answer is well it depends and then fast forwarding you know this legal person needs to be somewhere in a legal

jurisdiction so uh on this note we we looked at a bunch of jurisdictions including singapore canada germany uk uh netherlands and a few others and uh switzerland was one of the most promising but whenever you have this setup you also have like other entities that would interact with the project through this legal person like for example you know contractors and um other organizations partners and so on and so forth and like the the square that is behind the one two three here in this graphic would represent how each of these entities are also part of other legal jurisdictions

and some of them can be legal persons other can be natural persons depending on how the relationship is established but all in all this was kind of uh what we were looking for it's like hey can we establish this uh legal person that would help us develop ethereum the protocol the software the clients uh and uh you know be compliant and make sure that we won't get into at least too much uh trouble and uh this has become in a way kind of the classic setup uh many projects then uh uh adopted this this is kind of the standard the move these days but in all in all cases and this is something we'll get back to

in in like the second half of the presentation uh in every classic legal person that there is available be the foundation be it uh an association uh or a classic association be it a for-profit entity like an llc an ltd a gmbh usually the community is something when i say the community this is the community formed around the technology so that can be the open source contributors uh they they can be like meetup organizers and these uh people that bring value to the ecosystem in other ways than code of lines you know so for example in ethereum we were very lucky and i continue to believe that we are very

lucky to have a very vibrant community of people passionate to you know go organize events hackathons participate in them maybe this has taken a hit because of the whole you know corona situation but in any case this has been one of the key ingredients for ethereum success beyond just the the technology and beyond this legal strategy that allowed us to build this without fear of you know legal repercussions and in a way what we were seeking was reduced legal uncertainty and increased uh you know legal protection so it's like it's a double-edged sword here and you know uh looking uh uh back this was uh in a way

what led us uh to to took the canton and we were very lucky to uh you know meet also herbert and a bunch of other really great people that introduced us to the you the right people and so on and uh during one of the meetings with the local economic development team of zhuk this was in 2014 early 2014 when we didn't have any entity established and so on when i was trying to articulate and communicate like this can be an opportunity for switzerland this can be an opportunity for this type of technology that we're developing or you know we are dreaming about developing this was in 2014 would uh position zhukin a

very favorable kind of global arena to become one of the leaders in this emergent economy and uh this was very well received and as a meme you know crypto valley that was going to say crypto valley uh that kind of propagated and it took a life over on its own um another reason to be excited and fast forwarding you know uh to september this is a screenshot from then this page looks totally different these days but you know for historical purpose i'm just gonna use this one ethereum by uh leveraging these new concepts these new platforms and and this newfound home in the sweet switzerland as a jurisdiction we managed to raise

uh around 18.5 million dollars at the time and it was the biggest crowdfunding uh event in the history of the internet so quite you know epic uh in itself and i would like to draw your attention on the fact that you know number one there star citizen is a video game and um the the reason why it has 74 million in this slide is that it was not a one-off crowdfunding campaign so they had several several crowdfunding campaigns that added uh summed up would give that total uh but in the case of the ethereum it was a 42 days one-time event uh y-42 because 42 and uh like when you look at the

platform there you have bitcoin because we used bitcoin as a mechanism to raise the funds and independent and that's like one of the the the interesting insights here because when you look at this page again you would see it as a platform many of the crowdfunding projects uh using ethereum as the base layer on top of which we they they replicated the success we we had with ethereum and uh on the same day like september 2014 uh i published this post but i was talking about like this emergent crypto renaissance uh and it was maybe a bit ahead of his time but i still think we are uh in the midst of it and what we're witnessing is like still the beginning of what will be like

super huge um and um basically this uh string of characters the you know three six prz uh someone this bitcoin address was the address where people were able to send their bitcoins in exchange for the promise of this ether cryptographic receipt that would be usable when the ethereum blockchain would be launched and this uh you know back in the day when we were doing this stuff like we did not had terms like ico or token generation events or any of those things like we were still debating if crowdfunding would be an okay term to use uh but you know we ended up calling it the pre-sale and now our crowdfunding is okay

anyway you get the idea uh same for d phi you know which is kind of how decentralized finest these days but back then in 2014 when i was trying to kind of convey this idea of the crypto there is this highlighted uh portion in the bottom of the the quote the unfettered peer-to-peer worldwide worldwide digital finance grid is building itself up and i think to a great extent that is what we are witnessing uh these days and just for some like big picture uh viewing and understanding this is a short video which depicts uh in fast forward where the

modes the token sales that uh happened between 2014 and i think 2018 so it's not uh today but you would get so now we have ethereum popping approximated at 19 millions and the the colors of these uh dots would be representing the areas where you would have the uh token cells originating from so in this case you know you have like europe north america middle east state of san the dao ono and all these things that are popping up here this is like one of the accelerations like people starting to see oh wow this is something that i can also maybe apply for my company for my project

and more and more and more and more projects and as you can see there is a predominance of the projects based in europe that uh in turn uh many of them have their home in through the crypto valley so you know crypto valley be beyond just a fancy name that is uh cool is actually representing the home base for many projects that make their life you know they live or die by the crypto and on the same note what is important here to note is that ethereum in itself is a leading social organism which means that you know you see in this uh in this video you see how the the contributions

made via github so this is mostly code contributions are highlighted in this video and you have like the lines that you see here those are the contributions and the structure itself of the code and how these parts work and you know if you look at currently we are in 20 april 2015 and as you go there are certain milestones like you know there was the dao hard fork and there were a couple of attacks during a conference and you can see how this organism was able to adapt and to change and to evolve to meet uh to adapt to the environment to uh overcome the the challenges and the attacks

so to me this is again like fascinating and for for many people when they think of ethereum they think either in terms of money either in terms of tech but uh many times they miss the most important piece which is this community the people that are actually building the tech which actually the network effects established by these people might directly impact also the monetary evaluation of this project and its usefulness its utility uh another interesting uh topic that you know since its uh earliest announcement like ethereum the because myself and victory came from the bitcoin community and you know with big magazine we really try to outreach and

to to spread the word of what this technology can bring into the lives of people uh and you know when they tyrion came up was like whoa whoa are these guys friends or foes and what about this ethereum thing and you know there have been many people either falling into a camp or another you know like bitcoin one all the way ethereum uh no way and the other way around then in the end you know there are also a bunch of people in let's say in the center which see the value and how each of these pieces of the new economic financial puzzle are you know able to coexist and not only coexist but actually to

help each other in interesting ways so on this note for example this slide this is a recent post from the art ethereum this is like one of the most popular community forums used by the entering community and this is where i i spotted this uh how you know uh the rep bitcoin is uh one implementation uh of allowing uh defy this or decentralized finance protocols to use bitcoin as well so this means you know people that hold bitcoin on the bitcoin blockchain would be able use this uh service and in exchange for locking those bitcoins and being unable to use them on

the bitcoin blockchain they can now use this w and this wrapped uh bitcoin on the ethereum blockchain to access you know all of these uh services and defy uh games and and so on and so forth and one of the interesting uh uh analogies or metaphors that i've seen in this particular thread uh when you try to explain okay wait what bitcoin on ethereum uh and the explanation goes like this um so whenever you go to a casino you know it's not about gambling here although there is certainly an element of chance in in all this you know crypto currency space uh but the the metaphor applies to the to the fact that

you don't go with your credit card or you don't go with you know cash in your pockets to bet for the slots or to bet for blackjack or roulette or whatever it is they're in the casino when you go there you put in some money and exchange of those money you get some cheats with those chips representing the value of the money that you put in at the end of the session after you enjoy the casino to it's full extend with all the things it has to offer you say okay i'm calling it a night or a morning depending on how long you spend there and then in exchange for the chips hopefully by the end of the session you have more uh you would get you returned the cash so you know the money that you initially put in and uh to an extent this is what happens

also in this in this case you know the bitcoin is now becoming usable in this uh paradigm with all the ethereum ecosystem and all the the financial services and uh if the the user at some point wants to exit the e3 ecosystem he would basically burn the raptor token that lives on the ethereum blockchain and then he would be able to use the bitcoin that he has on the bitcoin so uh i'm oversimplifying it a bit i'm aware but just as a you know big picture idea we don't need to go into the nitty-gritty details and similarly this is an older uh post but again like a good one uh from may 2018 when during a fire

side chat with steve wozniak co-founder of apple uh he he said like here you might be the new episode and you know like i take this as a good thing not as a bad thing depends on what side you are but the point he was trying to make here because you know the presenter was like so which one is better bitcoin auditorium and so on and uh steve wozniak actually had the interesting comeback to this so he said bitcoin is like digital gold gold so a different kind of thing and ethereum is more of a platform and then he draws a parallel with when uh apple was started how apple ii the computer was a platform and you know then he goes here's all the

documentation open source you can see how you develop parts look at the examples we have done how to develop software how to modify the software in here and then it goes on it was a platform for others so thousands of companies started up sometimes high school kids started their own company and there were icos these days and they put up a little ads in the yeah for my product apple too so then you also have this other interesting paragraph which i think you it's a quite striking similarity how everybody in the world was advertising for us and we didn't have to so platform is how the world can grow by opening up to millions of other smart

people so in a way exactly what we have reached with ethereum and how we have set up this and there was also you know uh a series of decisions uh up leading up to the point where we said it's going to be a non-profit because this also created like uh in a way a linux type of safe environment where the company so ethereum if it wouldn't have been a foundation so you know like the meme that was like do we want to be kind of a crypto google or do we want to be a crypto mozilla and the crypto mozilla vision uh won here but if uh ethereum would have been a for-profit in this case we would have lost this uh very valuable uh proposition i think uh in the sense

that if someone you know like we have this defy type of services popping up left and right if the entity developing and maintaining the ethereum protocol would have seen that they might have had an incentive of like you know copying this and offering it an official ethereum product so this would have created a very weird incentive incompatibility between the maintainers and developers of the ecosystem ethereum as a whole the network effects and protocol technology smart contracts and so on and so forth and the people that would develop and not only people but also organizations and and so on so in the big picture i think this was one

of the good strategy moves that we took there and to to wrap up with you know the steve wozniak inside uh the last paragraph says the product that changed my life the most from apple isn't the iphone and the group it's the app store the apps that are in the app store third-party apps developed by all the people with all the ideas all over the place and that's an example of a platform so the parallel he's doing here it's about how the app store in a way if you want to to use this metaphor is in this case the ecosystem of all these decentralized applications and

services that use smart contracts on the ethereum protocol and uh if we look at the continuing you know this bitcoin versus ethereum narrative although uh highlighting that these are synergies that we're seeing here bitcoin as more of a digital gold uh property cryptocurrency uh maybe it doesn't make that much sense to be moved so often i mean it depends on the markets obviously and the demand and all that but at the same time seeing how ethereum is able to have uh double uh the transaction value of bitcoin is quite impressive but at the same time not unexpected because you know in part of those

transaction volumes and the the amount of money that is settled every day uh there's also a part in bitcoin so you it's like the lines between the two the two are not so clearly uh defined anymore so you have like this uh intertwining of destinies and ecosystems in economies that naturally emerges be between all these other blockchains so it's not just ethereum it's not just block the the bitcoin there are you know hundreds thousands of others and i believe in the future there will be this uh increased drive towards more interoperability and seamless uh value transfer also across ecosystems and you know to an extent this uh

decentralized exchange uh let's say craze is also something you know i when i entered the the bitcoin uh space in 2011 uh one of the the holy grails there you know is like yeah but it's not decentralized because we have to rely on these exchanges and you know that was like empty gox and a bunch of others are now you know long time gone but uh there were like many lessons uh you know painful lessons for many investors that just kept their money on exchanges that went badly up so similarly you know when you look at the the promise the initial promise and thinking behind the bitcoin as a white paper the electronic peer-to-peer peer-to-peer cash system uh you now have

like two of these initial intentions delivered so not just you know brainstorm delivered by the so on one side you have the electronic peer-to-peer cash system in the form of stable coins and many others that are more suited to cash type transactions that you know moving one bitcoin from a to b and then on the other side you have like this whole uh inflow and outflow between these ecosystems that kind of point to this decentralized exchange being one of the killer apps indeed of this uh ecosystem one of the probably there will be many to follow and you know i just make uh to go build outside just you know

cryptocurrency and so on there are also a bunch of like super interesting uh experiments happening around ethereum uh like uh just uh i think uh today or yesterday i saw this this post where a university is seeking now to send or to test how ethereum in this case a private ethereum blockchain how it could have various uh satellites to coordinate and communicate better which uh you know again there's somewhere there's also a joke about going to the moon but i'm going to leave that for you to fill in and uh coming back now to the you know akasha story and what happened long this time for me uh after you know we had the initial uh structure

in place and he didn't know you know had like a home base we had the legal strategy in place we had bank accounts oh my god don't get me started on that we had a bunch of things that are kind of basic business infrastructure you know so nothing too complicated but we were already pushing the boundaries with the thing we were trying to develop here so you know on one side having like a more classic uh legal person and you know classic bank accounts and all all these things were compensating for the fast forward the pace that we had on other dimensions and layers and uh after the ethereum genesis uh happened in 2015 in july uh that was a moment for me you know however after i say like wow block one

oh my god uh broke a hundred to block a thousand and so on that was like the moment for me was like wow all the efforts all the tears and the you know love joy of course uh and the blood and the the spread that went into this project and we went and we talked to these people and we we got things moving finally converging to this moment where this is not no longer just a dream this is no longer just a cool idea you talk about to your friends and sometimes maybe too much but it was something real it was no longer just a dream but it was a platform enabling other people to build their own dream so kind of like inception in a way and that was also a moment when uh in in during this time between

especially between the moment when we conducted the crowdfunding campaign and until the ethereum blockchain was actually released and we had the genesis and all that uh i was constantly thinking about like what are the new things and the cool or the coolest uh things that we can now use this technology and you know what are the big problems that before these were unsolvable you uh quotes and can we do something about it so that's how uh in uh may 3rd 2016 after months of prototyping and testing we announced akasha which has a word by the uh quick note stands for advanced knowledge architecture for social human

action and as a word the root it comes from sanskrit and it means ether and also has like some really nice metaphysical connotations there but the point here is that we saw the problem of censorship and how you have these centralized indexes being the source of truth as something that we can now work around because now we would have a decentralized index that would be transparent visible to everyone and they could choose what they get from there and of course because you know when you have social networks and social media it's not just text it's also like pictures it's also videos it's also audio and blockchain in general is not really designed to store data it's

more to keep track of transactions and storing data on blockchains is super expensive and also like not very scalable and um this is why we used two complementary technologies on one side you had the ethereum blockchain and on the other you had the interplanetary file system or shortened as ipfs to provide the distributed file system to kind of hold the video as an example with the smart contract uh living on the ethereum blockchain just pointing with the hash uh hey this is where you can find this video and what happens is that actually between the nodes so you have like an

akasha up here user a and the user b on the other side when you send the the video or you watch the video that data the the video itself is not necessarily rooted to the akasha servers so that would be peer-to-peer distributed among the users themselves which you know at every point we try to remove ourselves as much as possible from the middle of the information flow and since 2016 you know we've worked really hard and we released three fully fully functioning decentralized applications the first one was a desktop app which basically when you were installing the

cache app you were installing bundled an ethereum node and an ipfs node so your computer was becoming a node in the network from the get-go and lowering you know the user experience barriers at the time it was like wow finally a decentralizer people can use and beyond that you know we learned many things and we had also a beta which uh was initially a desktop app and then we we've rewritten the ipfs part to work in the browser and this was like uh close to so summer 2018 towards 2019.

and that was the moment when we reached the level of like you know so for example you would have an akasha uh social network tab open in your chrome or firefox whatever you're using and uh when you're watching and scrolling in your feed and you see like pictures videos posts from other people you're not actually getting that data from us you would actually your tab in your browser would communicate peer-to-peer with other tabs of the people you're actually getting the information from so technically speaking it was an achievement the milestone is like wow this can work you know it's like why do we need decentralized you know wow in our bubble but then at the same time you know reality hit and you have the the problem of user

experience and slow loading time because the information needs to find across various nodes until it actually gets to you and for example you have other problems like when i post something and i close my computer before that information gets to spread into the distributed network you when you try to access that in big the file is not available because no one no node in the network has that information so you know it's you have always pros and cons and these are on the the con side and this is how in 2019 i started this series of posts which i should continue probably uh speaking about the metamorphosis in our thinking and how we realize that we what we were doing uh was you know just a stepping stone towards what we

should actually do and to sum it up you know in uh again over simplify terms basically even if we initially wanted to do a social network that you know was transparent and working in the interest of the people and it would be decentralized and any power asymmetry would be quickly identified and addressed uh still you have like a philosophical question it's like hey you want to build a decentralized social network okay so then you have the decentralization as the technological aspect but when you look at the fact that there would be one social network again that's like centralized

so it's like centralization for decentralization not really aligned philosophically speaking with what we had in mind and the goal and what we were aiming for and this is how in 2019 and since then we've started working on the framework and you know like during this time when we built this uh three fully fully functional applications and so on we also got let's say a bit better at building so blockchain-enabled social networks and the idea here would be what if we can compress all the knowledge and all the years in which we have developed you know and trial and at some point yes success into an experience that would enable anyone from

anywhere to kind of spawn their enhanced or enabled the social network so in a sense you know even if it's not an accurate comparison you can think of something like the wordpress for social networks and uh that would mean you know just like with wordpress you can have like your own domain and you can have your own blog or form or you know you have a bunch of templates there you can imagine something similar with the kasha word framework where you have like a cause a community or something that you see well suited for this type of social network setup and you take this and you deploy your own social network and it comes with some advantages and uh it also i think it's more aligned to that vision of decentralization because it's

not just one it's a network of networks and the problem and here is you know we come back to where we started akasha and you know the foundation and the setup and so on more or less we applied the lessons we learned and the setup uh that we did with ethereum as well so you know we have the foundation the foundation lives in the switzerland jurisdiction this is the legal person i am you know one of the people a b c d there and the technology that we are developing is this framework but the problem again as in as i said in the beginning is that the community that is so critical especially when you're talking about open source projects and social networks that live or die by the contributions and

adoption of these communities are still not protected and are still left outside the the let's say the shield the legal shield and the legal protection and everyone is on their own and there have been some experimentation on this like governance layer and so on and you know lay more recently saw this trend was using tokens uh as the signaling mechanism for all sorts of uh governance systems and you know in a nutshell you know we have a couple of examples here uh this token would be distributed somehow and purchased by the community and the community could then use this token to

signal to some legal person that is based in some legal jurisdiction what they should do in relation to the technology and how that should progress moving forward and uh you know in theory it sounds kind of okay but the the problem is that in reality what is actually happening is that you have this relationship where the community is given like hey here's a token and uh you're basing this on kind of like a social contract where the legal person says or takes the engagement in front of the community hey you know this voice that you're doing with this token we'll keep in mind and consider those and actually whatever the community decides we will do however if there is a conflict let's

say between you know the legal person in interest the conflict of interest between the legal person and the community ultimately the entity that has the ultimate say would be the legal person because those people are the ones that are liable and you know on the other side you have like this faceless mess of people that just have some tokens or more or less you know and uh just as an example on how one of these these setups you know compound is one of the uh trend setters so to say uh this year with the how they implemented the the governance model using their token and as you can see here you have like a bunch of recent proposals and there was like you know for example

a uni swap improvement strategy add the uni token support and so on and so forth and then you also have that it was executed so at the protocol level probably this means that the compound is now compatible with these things that were proposed initially by the community and under that you can also see that the top address is by voting weight you know you have the a16z policing capital and a bunch of others uh that have a vote weight and then you know like three percent one percent and so on and so forth and the numbers of proposals where these uh entities have voted now uh when we when we go to that left side you know the legal person uh you see at the bottom of the the the page that there is this entity

the compound labs uh incorporated which i assume this is the legal person behind the technology just as we had these problems with you know the individual legal liability and so on these developers also wanted some legal certainty and probably this was how they thought they can get it and this isn't by no way you know it's like no criticism or anything i'm just kind of pointing out what's out there and covering um and this is one way you we saw a bunch of other companies doing a similar setup where you have these tokens used as a proxy for signaling your decision and the community agreement another uh model you know like more radical it's these of where kind of like the token uh

represents again like the the governance in a way and the the technology that is going to be developed and someone could also have like these type of proposals and the members of the community can vote the problem with uh the daos and you know it's like why don't we have more dios my assumption here is that the legal jurisdiction aspect is completely missing from the the picture and you know you have on one side these people are crying it's like code is law yes maybe but that doesn't make the existing laws evaporate you are still based in some jurisdiction and there are some clear advantages to having like uh you know a legal person there in

place uh and one of them like for example being that these individuals being part of a dio have absolutely zero uh like legal protections and because there is no legal jurisdictions they are actually liable in all uh illegal generations like wait what and then uh it's for every single one of the individuals because they're not formed or part of a legal person they're also personally reliable in whatever jurisdictions they are based in you know so it's like if when one justice is not going to do that in this jurisdiction then they would be directly liable for whatever this entity would do

and affects this jurisdiction so anyway all in all i would say that the main value propositions of these decentralized autonomous organizations they are are highlighted by the transparent resource management because you have these addresses the smart contracts these transparent balances that can be audited and then on the other side you know the decentralized governance aspect and we'll get back to the decentralized part uh in the next uh slide here where you know curve is another quite popular uh decentralized finance protocol and in august there was this uh you know uh happening where uh in an over uh overreaction the the founder uh staked uh

uh too many tokens and this you know showed how uh centralized in a way this whole governance is and you know i think uh to an extent this also gets back to to the point that when you look at the the way people have tried to uh approach the decentralized aspect of governance they mostly focused on the technology and that went with putting the social contract on chain and you know it also comes with the problems of having all these on-chain interactions in form of gas costs and it's again pros and cons but when you look at the actual decentralization that should be given by these tokens this

economic representation and um abstraction uh usually you have like between the top 10 to top 50 addresses having more than half of the token so you know in some sense it's like actually less decentralized that maybe what you would get in a traditional entity with a traditional legal person and you know the checks and balances that we have in place that we share further agreements and so on and so forth and you know when you look at the way this is like from the page of car curve finance uh you know he's like it's fully decentralized with the launch of the dao uh but there is all this emergency deo which is able to pause the pause and it has nine members and 59.999 support and a 50 one percent quorum curve

emergency uh dio so anyway this is kind of like an escape valve oh my god things are not going well and you activate kind of the red button here and the last line here is kind of like okay curve will be transitioning to a deo to be fully descended right so again decentralized is the key word here and he's like okay this dio is not decentralized so we'll do another deal so we'll be fully decentralized i'm not really following the law i want to focus today and what i wanted to bring to discussion is another take on the centralization and just as we had you know with the pros and cons of having a fully decentralized social network and user experience the loading times and so on and so forth i think

when you look at this centralized in the the decentralized autonomous organization and so on decentralization does not always refer to the technology it does not refer to the economic wealth distribution either my take is that the situation the centralization refers specifically to decentralized governance and for decentralized governance you don't always need like this complicated on blockchain thing so for example if there are a thousand people in this zoom call and we say you know we're gonna make something a super cool decentralized experiment now and uh whoever does live now in this call the most push-ups

will have the most say in whatever decision we will have as 1000 participants so my take here is that the this would be from a governor's perspective more more decentralized than you know just a bunch of addresses having like over 50 percent of the say because you know there is a limit to how much one person how many push-ups a person can do in terms of financial the the model that we currently have in the eos and this economic token used also as governance the bottom line is that the people with the most money will have the most say and you know at least personally when i sign up and started this whole ethereum thing that's not what i had in mind and i think we can do better

and that at least as long as we acknowledge that there are other ways is that that's one out of many i think we're on a right track so it's like normal to experiment until you find like the the best suited forms for the best use cases so that being said for the last few months especially driven by this idea of like having these social networks that are built with akasha framework we reached this uh interesting decentralized autonomous association's concept which is a work initially started by sebastian berger from validity labs and um since then you know it has went through a bunch of iterations and what i'm going to talk about today is like one flavor out of many so this is like i would say a separate

species compared to dios very similar in some cases but in some senses but also quite different in others and when it takes to you know the decentralization uh what i'm going to kind of introduce here is the concept of minimum viable centralization so what are the areas where you really don't need the blockchain but you can still ensure that the centralization governance aspect and you can use the blockchain wherever it makes the most sense and you know uh if we compare it to the daos you still have the main value propositions as transparent resource management and um decentralized decision making on how those resources are going to be spent so i think we can

uh have that plus uh lowering the legal uncertainty and providing a legal person that can actually you know provide peace of mind to the members of this new type of vehicle of collaboration so again like you know boxes and circles we have a legal jurisdiction just as we had before but in this case it's switzerland right inside this uh jurisdiction we have a legal person and in this case it's going to be an association that has the articles of association tweaked in a way that basically makes this association as a blockchain native association and uh here is the interesting bit the compared to the other scenario where the

community was outside the legal person the community is inside the legal person and i think this is like one of the most important takeaways in this uh presentation so if by now you know it's like blah blah blah if this is something you can take away this would be a huge win there there are ways in which you can architect legal frameworks to uh leverage the software capabilities and the value transfer while also increasing the legal certainty and lowering the you know all the bad stuff that could happen because there is no certainty uh in many jurisdictions in switzerland though different stories different case so uh in this case you know if the community are the members

that are part of the general assembly within the association uh in the we talked about the social network as an example the social network here is the technology that would be developed right so you have on one side the community which can be also users of the the social network but it's not you know always like you can be also a user without not being a member of the association uh and this uh software platform this social network is based in switzerland right so it has to comply with some local laws but it also has to comply with some guidelines and bylaws passed by the community itself in and this is where it's quite interesting because also in uh in exchange you can have these

interactions with the legal person with other legal persons so the individual members of this association this dea if they want to interact with others and you know as a community they now have this uh legal person that is able to speak on behalf of the community so it's not you're not necessarily talking with an individual you're talking with this meta uh legal person and uh coming back to idea of like these social networks and these networks uh the of governance uh this is uh how i see things could evolve so you you for every social network that you have there you also need to think about the the governance and i think you know to an extent this is why it's so hard to tackle the problems of moderation

because it's not all about tech it's also about the jurisdiction the laws and the things and how the governance in itself is is done then you know this could also be summed up as in to an extent algorithm algorithms of autonomy that can be customized and applied to whatever context you have so you know going back and you know to kind of wrap up this presentation already long but i hope you enjoyed it uh from the initial crypt of that you know a bunch that came to zug and then you know visited the local economic development team of trug and presented this idea and we had a number of evolutions of the crypto valley mean so and you know uh one of the first ones was the crypto valley area because it

was not just trug it was also zurich and other cantons around they started to was like oh crypto interesting we maybe we should also do some of this and the next one was uh you know crypto nation and this was like wow this is this is here or that this is what i was referring to this takes a life of its own and this is uh you know uh an excerpt from 2018 when uh the ex-president of switzerland is johan schneider a uh said that you know switzerland should become crypto valley this good thing that is in should not stay there and should spread out throughout the the country uh moving forward you know in march 2019 this is uh another uh quote from willie

mauer i hope i'm pronouncing correct uh and i'd like to draw your attention on something really important the last paragraph there that's highlighted uh the government recently started the consultation process to update financial and corporate and corporate regulations to bring them in line with blockchain technological advances so to me this they're thinking about how to bring the laws in line with the tech to me this is like already like 10 steps forward to other jurisdictions that are trying to fight this from the other uh position so uh and um starting next year we also have this uh

you know uh experiment with the the taxes this uh actually was initially quite a small experiment i think it was up to a few hundred francs but now we are going to i think something like you can pay up to 100 000 swiss francs in texas directly using bitcoin and ether which you know this is where uh crypto native uh organization like you know this association becomes very interesting because now you know some of the problems that you had initially and why you know going back to the amoeba pollution you also had this crypto valley ecosystem this was something that i heard a bit more recently and because the the banks in general you know are kind of reluctant when it comes to cryptocurrency it depends on the bank of

course and uh certainly there are more banks today than there were in 2014 open to the idea of like something something blockchain something something crypto uh but this was for example an opportunity for liechtenstein and you know a bunch of banks like bank freak for example that you know oh so you have a company in switzerland and there are no swiss banks that are willing to work with you we'll work with you and this is how you know the crypto valley uh kind of spread more than just the crypto valley area and crypto evaluation to the ecosystem and i think you know uh all in all this is will you know go back and forth and i think we will see some some interesting developments in the future and um yeah what what next

what comes next it's hard to say but there are a few things that we can look around and for example you know estonia has an interesting neighbor has an interesting program with the residents and he's one of the most advanced let's say in europe at least in this regard and one of the things they lead with and why they say this is a cool thing for you and how they present the value proposition is that you can uh as a digital entrepreneur you can start and manage a eu-based company online and to me you know like this association and the decentralized autonomous association that would be incorporated in switzerland and so could also play to these strengths and also like add things on top because you know you have the blockchain you have the cryptocurrency aspect you

have the legal certainty you have the legal frameworks you have a bunch of things that are super valuable to entrepreneurs and big businesses that want legal certainty they don't want you know room for questions and it's like what if this is also an interesting quote from the president of estonia where you know it's a quite a small country a little over a million of us and we can make 10 million payments perform 10 million requests and sign 10 million contracts in just 10 minutes right so my hope is that the next time you know we'll look at this we'll also be able to say something at least as impressive if not more impressive by switzerland and how it's able to you know even if relatively in the in like population is

quite a small country compared to others it can still do great things you know with what it has now in its hands and uh as an interesting experiment this is what was born out of a hackathon uh some developers used the estonian e-residency card to generate the keys for an ethereum wallet right so this means that you have now a trusted source that can be used to generate these keys and you also have some kind of mechanism that could be used to recover your keys and this could also be like a very interesting gateway into how for example you know slogan switzerland as a whole if

it starts to think about how this can be leveraged and integrated between the layers of the daily social operations and you know administration of the cantons and uh it's big picture and quite quite quite impressive these are the things where i think uh it could benefit greatly from increased transparency increased efficiency lower costs uh all the good stuff that you know an efficient governance system would look like and speaking of governance and i'm nearing the end of my presentation there are also some interesting so i think this is definitely a trend we are now on the edge of like i think there's going to be a huge explosion of

governance models in 2021 and for from the linux foundation this is a post was published on 15 october i highly recommend to read it it also talks about the challenges and how uh they are actively searching for solutions on how this you know blockchain thing seems like a piece of the puzzle but still this is an unsolved problem and coming back to this you know is like to an extent it feels like this experiment and one what we are working with here in order to make like you know on one side you have the legal entity and on the other side you have the software that is governed by the legal entity and then the legal the software itself can be uh evolved to provide the tools with which the

entity the legal entity is governed is like quite an interesting uh feedback group that can improve and like the community itself can evolve so it's not something that you put on top of you know this is the governance duke and in this line of thought there are also very interesting papers and this is again like a very highly record i'm not a big fan of the modular politics maybe i would go for modular governance but that being said the authors did a great job of highlighting how for example the classical governance topologies tend to present a choice among a wholesale of ideologies such as democracy or oligarchy and modular politics would enable platform operators and their

users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular composable highly versatile in their expressiveness portable from one context to another and interoperable across uh platforms so if you take that and you put it as social networks you get some like really ideas so you know suddenly the moderation guidelines that are applicable and what is accepted in one community do not have to be the same across you know two billion people like the problems facebook faces and again if like your social network is based in a different jurisdiction you have different laws that you need to follow and so on and so forth so this uh by bringing this decentralization within like the tech

the governance layer would enable many systems and many governance experiments to go side by side and might i think in the future we would observe some patterns that behave better in some contexts and you know others would in other contexts would do better and we're still super early and this is also like another example of how moderation which is like a super complicated topic could take place and could work within a social network implementing this modular polity concept and uh or in all you know to take the the point home this and what we are working with akash and like the the point

behind the smarter communities uh at the local uh regional and global level comes also from the interoperability of these things also without necessarily imposing your views on another community so if you do not resonate with that community and you don't want to be part of it that's fine but there are others that resonate and want to be part of that and we should be able to provide them the tools with which they can make their community better to reflect whatever they believe in so if they have values that not resonate with yours they can build and you know evolve their own system and you are free to build your own so it's like i think to an extent this also attacks the problem of freedom of expression and collective freedom of expression and this also i think points to

uh what i'm currently kind of describing as decentralized autonomous social networks because social networks in general are like still operated by an entity be it facebook or twitter or whatever you know you have like an ink and a ltd foundation something in the back and this would be a leap forward i think because this is the part where people are now able to organize better to coordinate action and to fund that action across the globe so this is the part where the global reach and this universal finance layer can be used to organize coherent and efficient local action which is like priceless you know in a way and uh i think you know this is what we need more of community government social

media where there is no top ceo or like person somewhere in an ivory tower deciding for billions of people what can be said and what can be not and leave this ultimately to the people that are there to decide you know it's almost like we find ourselves in the ancient greek landscape where you know you had agora but this public square is no longer private and you have this someone that decides who can get in what can be said what cannot be said oh you said that you're out so that's a very dangerous proposition and i think you know the work and the landscape and what switzerland has provided us give give us the right environment to test these ideas and i'm super grateful for that

and on that note the first social network that will apply and combine these concepts together will be ethereum that work and in the next two months we will announce a lot more if you want to stay up to date go on ethereum that word then you will you you can subscribe and we will uh release uh gradually the application and then the legal entity and we will work on how these things can work together so we can provide almost like a kit on your blockchain enabled community you know on the get-go and uh you know to apply it here this would mean also that because it's going to be in the ethereum ecosystem there's also room for because we refused with akasha to do an ico during the whole ico

craze any community can also be free to create its own currency its own value and to tap into the existing social capital that is present in these communities but not uh abstracted or presented in a way that is made useful economically so i think this will give us the tools and uh i know i'm super excited about the future and i'd like to thank you for you for your attention and i i invite you to keep you know to stay up to date with what we're doing in case you found these ideas interesting on akasha.org ethereum.world and uh thank you for your attention yes you are really on the point here

thank you so much mia um i'm i'm i'm puzzled i'm i'm impressed what what you can vent out in this small hour but on information it was really really impressed what do you know about that and you have a big vision in your mind i feel that i think and thank you for your presentation it was uh great and uh i have a question there from uh thank you for having me yeah you're very welcome and um every time again please constantly have a question what do you think about the idea of voting for example to hold present

present presidential elections on the blockchain there are a voice against it but why my limited technical understanding it would make sense so first of all it's like when whenever you involve new technologies in processes that uh have so uh wide reach it's always you know it's like we we should probably start lower so instead of going straight president probably better to do something smaller like i don't know a council election something local and then you know if goes well then you you you grow so that's the the first point

the second is that the the blockchain in in general at least you know the normal blockchain without any new things on top it's transparent and that can also be a bad thing in the case of elections because many times the the way or who you voted for can be also depending on where you are living used against you you know so it's like i'm voting for that person and then you know the dictator comes and says give me that list of addresses and who voted against me yeah yeah bring them to bring them to me i have a chat with them so uh unless we have a way and i think we are almost there unless we have a way in which we can ensure on one side the unicity of the person

that has voted and have a zero knowledge of of what the vote was actually you know tested the system of blockchain can be used indeed in interesting ways for elections but as it is blockchain simple it's not very well suited so it needs this uh extra things to to make it work for this particular purpose okay thank you for that and uh constantine makes uh a compliment to you it is really inspired to listen to him and see his ambitions yes that's true um it's it's a good comment i think um and considering that and he said we'll definitely subscribe

okay um see us again i think later in the panel it will be there a really impressed discussion there i think for us all because i have some questions more inside in this rabbit hole perhaps and we will look there what's happened and it's a pleasure to see you again later thank you so long mihai thank you thank you very much looking forward to this thank you again for inviting me and a big thanks to canton of switzerland and everyone that made this event uh possible

wishing the best best place ever yeah so thank you